The man in the smelly fur coat.

I got on to the 24 bus at South End Green and climbed up the stairs hoping to find the front seat empty. I like the front seat, it is the best seat on the bus, it makes you duck when you come to bridges and low trees and the corner of the bus above your head is crumpled like an old coke tin from hitting things.
Dad says that you know when you've grown up when you no longer want to sit at the front of the bus. Dad still sits in the front seat... Mum doesn't anymore!

The bus was completely full except for one seat next to a funny little man in an enormous brown fur coat. I sat down beside him and assumed the position; the position is how us teenagers have to sit, grown ups call it slouching but it is not slouching.. A lot of research and hard work goes into assuming the position. The key point is that one leg must be stuck out into the aisle threatening to trip other passengers. You could spend a lifetime tweaking the assumed position and never get bored.

I soon found out why no-one else was sitting next to the funny little man... He stank!

The smell was horrible, it reminded me of the time Zippy Gazelle our kitten pood in a gumboot one summer and no-one found it until bonfire night. We still don't know how he got his bum up onto the gumboot without it falling over; Fizz, my brother, said he pood in the boot when it was lying down and then pushed it upright. Cats are clever like that, he said.

Dad found the cat poo in the gumboot with his foot.

I looked at the smelly old man and said: 'It's not very politically correct to wear animal skins, is it?'

He looked at me with one eye. The other eye looked at something else. 'It's OK when the bear has given you the coat himself'. He said in a not very good American accent like an English actor pretending to be a cowboy in a rubbish film.

'It stinks'. I said.

'So would you if you'd been wrapped round a bear all your life'.

I asked him how he got it and he told me this weird story without his cowboy accent.

He said: 'I test out stories for childrens comic books. The government says that all the things that comic characters do must be possible in real life, otherwise children would end up with unrealistic expectations when they grow up. So anyway I try out the things they do. I got this coat when I was testing a fight between a grizzly bear and Desperate Dan for the Beano comic; I went to America and looked for the biggest meanest grizzly I could find, there were lots of small ones but not very many the size I wanted.
One day I went out looking and forgot to take my coat and as expected, because it was in the story, a blizzard arrived with a grizzly inside it. The grizzly was also inside a lovely warm fur coat.
I looked at that fur coat and the bear looked at me looking at that coat and we both knew what we were going to fight about.

We wrestled and we wrastled, we pooh poohed the rules, we clinched and he clawed, we snarled and we growled. The fight lasted all afternoon til finally I did a brilliant body slam on him and then got him in a full nelson. "I submit, I submit". The bear said so I let him up and he got to his feet, eyed me admiringly then took off his fur coat and handed it to me... He went off into the woods shivering and what I thought was a woodpecker was the sound of his knees knocking together.

So thats how I got this fur coat and that's why it is ok for me to wear it'.

I was laughing like mad by the time he finished his story, if fizz had been there he would have wet himself like he does when dad tells his funny stories.

I didn't call the smelly old man a liar because his story had been so good. I asked him if he was working on something and where was he going?... He said he was doing a story about a Zebra that has escaped from the zoo and is rampaging through Camden market right now and he has to get off the bus, grab a purple scarf from a man in a pale coat then leap on the zebra using the scarf as reins and gallop off back to the zoo.

I smiled as he reached over and pressed the red dinger that told the driver you wanted to get off, then he squeezed smellily past me, said 'good afternoon' and walked down the steps as the bus stopped at Camden market.

As the bus stopped at Camden market there was a yell from the crowds and a panicking zebra ran from between some stalls. I watched the old man leap from the bus, grab a purple scarf from around the neck of a man in a pale coat, jump onto the zebra, and using the scarf as reins, gallop off down the canal tow path towards the zoo.